Featured Opinion Piece

The Bunker Mentality
William Rivers Pitt

I wrote to Ambassador Joseph Wilson last week to ask how he and his wife were bearing up, and to remind them that they had a lot of friends. "The outpouring of support has been of great comfort to us these past two years," he wrote back. "The stakes are enormous. This is all about whether our government can take us to war on lies without any fear of being held to account, and whether our democracy can survive the coalition of fascist forces that have seized control of the levers of power."

Heavy stuff. Yet if the desperation we are seeing on the part of defenders of this administration offers any clue, the fascists are running out of explanations. Take Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's performance on this past Sunday's version of Meet the Press. "I certainly hope," she said when asked about the Fitzgerald investigation into the deliberate outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars."

Some perjury technicality, eh? Waste of time and dollars?

Funny the difference almost seven years and two broken elections can make. Back on February 12, 1999, when Ms. Hutchison cast her vote to impeach a sitting president of the United States, she was of a different mind when it came to perjury. Her statement in Congress practically peeled the paint off the wall, so laden was it with outrage at the violation of an oath taken before the delivery of sworn testimony.